We have been watching recently as President Obama appointed Vivek Kundra the new federal CIO.  He was formerly in a similar position for the city of Washington, DC, and was touted for opening up Washingtonl, DC, to the people in innovative ways.  As such, much anticipation is being heaped on data.gov (see article on Slashdot and other transcripts of interviews), a new website which is touted as the place where any non-private, government data will be made available to the public.  We will be following this push closely.   

Wired magazine has a really interesting piece out on the topic of the opening up of government data.  While they are getting into a lot of territory which I am not familiar with, my concern has been the lack of will among government agencies (usually because of underlying statute) to share information that can help us to understand things like innovation and entrepreneurship.  Many countries have been able to set goals for data which serve research and policy functions.  While the Nordic countries have always been strong, recently, I have been impressed with Canada's modernization of their statistical infrastructure.  Change is possible.

Wired has gone a step further in setting up an Open Up Government Data wiki to track data which should be opened up for the benefit of society.  I wouldn't have thought of a wiki for this purpose but it's really quite interesting. 

There has been a fairly strong debate among many funding agencies and top-tier academic institutions about scholarly publications and access issues over the last few years.  Last fall, I heard an interesting interview on National Public Radio's Science Friday podcast concerning the National Institute of Health's efforts to make research they funded open-access.  From my dealings with with the Social Science Research Network to promote dissemination of academic publications on entrepreneurship (see Entrepreneurship Research and Policy Network), I suspected that efforts to push open-access publication are likely to be dealt with at the disciplinary level and that the mores of the each discipline in adopting norms are extremely different.

Yesterday, I saw a new announcement from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which has caused me to wonder if open-access is reaching a tipping point that could sweep across academia.  MIT's release of a campus-wide, open-access publication model for its faculty's research has the potential to cascade across the U.S. and the globe.  MIT, with its diversity of strengths in academic research, would seem an ideal place to begin such a domino effect.  You can read their actual policy or a good overview article on the whole process at ars technica. 
 
One thing I didn't see specified in the MIT policy that I will be interested to find clarification on is how MIT plans to treat the underlying research data which scholarly publications are based upon.  This has been a murky area in Economics, but less so in other disciplines, and how the university treats the research data could have other significant implications. MIT's libraries have a page devoted to open data, which do give an overview of some of the big players in this area but I diddn't see reference to open data in their policy.

An article and an op-ed from today's New York Times that were seemingly unrelated got me thinking.  The first article was on Dr. Larry Brilliant's change in direction at Google.org (their philanthropic effort).  The op-ed by Kenneth Duberstein focused in on the need for a centralized state of the union in data that he proposes be run out of the National Academies. 

While these are seemingly very different topics, I see a great deal of possible relation.  The State of the U.S.A. project has been percolating for the last year, that I know of, in many Washington, DC, circles.  While I think there are many things that make sense about the project as I understand it - timely, relevant data - I am concerned about the ability of the National Academies to find means in which they can reach the people of the United States, not just the policy wonks and data-obsessed.  That is where my mind jumped to Google and some of the amazing things they have done in the last year with Google Flu Trends, and I began hoping the Google might somehow launch down the path of helping countries to set up their own Google Country Trends-type of platform.  Real-time data, drawn from other people's series as well as Google data, that countries could help to define and Google would help to bring to the people.  At the heart of what Dr. Brilliant's article said was that Google was trying to find ways to bring its philanthropic efforts back inside the house and relevant to their business work.

While I am on the subject, I have some concerns about whether having a State of the U.S.A. will actually give us the detail needed to make decisions.  So many of these decisions are made at the state and local level, but much of the data which the State of the U.S.A. would inevitably use would not be available at the sub-national level.  It's a real problem for many of our data series, one that I've particularly learned about from Andy Reamer at the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program.  There is little doubt that the National Academies brings the best in the country together in a non-partisan way (Connie Citro does amazing work with the Committee on National Statistics), but Google, or their type of real-time data interface, is something that I doubt the National Academies could achieve, at least unaided.